Brassard chuckled and chimed in with some details here and there and affectionately covered his wife’s hand with his baseball mitt of a hand. Diz sipping her coffee with indifference. I liked Will for taking on his mother with good humor and no mercy.
After a bit, the conversation turned to other things, and the family seemed to wrap around itself, so I took my leave and went back out to finish the job. I covered three hundred feet of drainage pipe, back and forth dozens of times on the trusty Ford. I worked until I was so tired I was afraid I’d mess up again, then shut it down and hobbled back up here. The valley was darkening and the windows of the house came alight behind me. I walked up into my dark woods knowing that it would be one of those nights of missing kin and connection, and I dreaded it.
Slumped on my fireside log, the lantern giving light to write by, the most resonant image in my exhausted mind is Will. It’s the way he looked when he and I were hooking up the winch cable. He’s slim, rangy, well proportioned, with medium-length brown hair. He was wearing jeans and an old checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and for a few seconds he just stood straight and looked around the family’s acres, nostalgically appreciative. At that moment he struck me as very handsome and somehow familiar.
Which is the worst, the most middle school, dumb-ass fairyland thing of the whole goddamn day. I was wondering if Will Brassard is married or not, and if maybe destiny has brought me here so I’ll meet my soul mate at last. And I wondered how I’d struck him, if he’d found me gross or if maybe my muddied, sweated, dieseled, sunburned, ragged-denim-covered inept self had a certain je-ne-sais-quoi appeal.
I can hardly stand to write this. I’m too disgusted with myself. This situation is not about Finding One’s Will Brassard At Last. It’s not about a man, it’s not about a “relationship.” I am appalled to discover this awful Cinderella wannabe still living inside me. How readily she rears her ash-smudged little hopeful prince-seeking head when she gets within arm’s length of a man her own age.
I’m going to sleep now.
I did not go to sleep. At some point, I got up and dutifully heated a pot of water, soaped myself down, standing naked in my little clearing to rinse the stink and grime off me. I put my clothes into a plastic trash bag so their smell wouldn’t pollute the night air. Then, scoured skin thrilled and goose-bumped with the cold, I sort of danced. I danced gestures of apology to the night woods for ignoring their grace and generosity, and I requested their friendship again and felt as though I received it.
I assure you this was not at all a New Agey sort of thing. I didn’t try to commune with some wise, vastly serene and maternal Gaia—I doubt this dear planet has ever been either serene or particularly concerned with any one creature’s misery. What this was: a tired, desperate human being trying to regain some sense of connection to herself and to some part of the world, and resorting instinctively to something like prayer—a prayer to no being but to the whole damn thing.
Really, I had nothing else. It’s that simple.
But there it was again: necessity. The mother of invention, they say, but also the mother of resiliency. After my ablutions and dance of supplication, I felt renewed.
Chapter 16
An exposition on manure is not a digression. On dairy farms, it is a central and continuous concern. Manure requires pushing, scooping, hoeing, shoveling, pumping, relocating, hosing, piling, and spreading. In winter, with the cows in the barn, it’s a major daily undertaking, but even in summer the poop needs to be removed after the cows have sashayed into and out of the milking parlor. It’s part of every working day.
Over the years, I had walked in pastures and stepped around cow pies, those neat nests of ground-up fibrous material. So I always assumed that cow poop came out with a texture like horses’.
In reality, it emerges as a thick liquid the color of soy sauce. Deposited in the pasture, its water drains into the soil, leaving only the residues of grass and feed in that nice pie shape, solid enough that you can throw it like a discus. But on concrete, with nowhere for the water to soak away to, it lingers as a wet, soupy slurry. You spend a lot of time removing it with hoe, shovel, or the tractor’s bucket or scraper blade.
I mention this now because Will came to chat with me while I was cleaning off the concrete pad where the cows congregated as they waited their turn in the milking parlor. When I thanked him for deflecting his mother’s contempt for my tractoring, he just laughed. He acknowledged that Diz was an acquired taste.
I had recovered from the psychological stumbles of the day before. The largesse of the night woods had soothed me and allowed me to accept myself a bit. I’d landed in the new day with some measure of grace and balance.
I had even forgiven Cinderella. I figured that, like any creature in the woods, no matter how noxious, she had some rightful niche in the ecosystem. If I encountered her, I would respectfully replace the rock I found her under and trust that she had some odd but indispensable place in the scheme of things.
Yes, when Will came to
